


What If Nothing

by yet_intrepid



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Action/Adventure, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Escape, Gen, Matt Holt has PTSD - Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Matt Holt-centric, Prison Capitalism, RevHolt: A Matt Holt Zine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-08
Updated: 2018-07-08
Packaged: 2019-06-07 11:40:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15218363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yet_intrepid/pseuds/yet_intrepid
Summary: Matt’s doing his best to survive in prison. He’s adjusting, keeping his head down, using his tech skills. He’s given up dreaming of escape.But then things explode.[Written for RevHOLT, a VLD Matt Zine!]





	What If Nothing

**Author's Note:**

> It was a delight to work with RevHOLT, and it's a delight to finally share my full zine piece with you all! I stole the title from Walk the Moon's most recent album, which has so many good Matt songs.

On the day Matt gets rescued, he isn’t hoping for it. He isn’t thinking about Earth or escape or finding someone to hold him. The day he get rescued is—it’s just a day. A resigned sort of day, and in prison, that’s the best he can hope for. At this point, anything else is too good to be true.

On the day Matt gets rescued, he’s just finished trekking across the camp to the wastewater treating division and then back to the IT lab again, because his boss trusts him enough to let him walk around unsupervised but not enough to allow him much access to the comms. It’s relatively reasonable, Matt reminds himself, as his bad leg yells complains at him for all the walking. He really could hack into all kinds of sensitive information if he only knew the passcodes and frequencies. His boss is no genius, but he isn’t dumb.

The lab is empty. Matt eases himself onto the floor—the benches and chairs are Galra-use-only unless otherwise specified—as soon as the door slides shut behind him. Groaning a little, he massages his calf.

“You’ve gotten old and frail, Holt,” he mutters to himself. “Old and frail and boring. Always thinking about when you can sit down.”

On the day Matt gets rescued, the tech lab is empty. It’s the Galra new year festival, though Matt isn’t sure how much that really means for a species that doesn’t seem to be based on any particular planet. But everybody has to mark time somehow, so he doesn’t think too hard about it.

Back before, he would’ve. He’d probably have developed seventy theories and conducted an informal study or something. But too much is inexplicable, these days. Too much is ceaselessly strange, and his curiosity has dimmed.

He regrets that, he realizes, as he struggles up from the floor. He regrets being satisfied with the fact that the holiday has left him unsupervised for a few hours, able to work in peace. But it’s as good as he’s going to get, and fuck him if he’s not going to appreciate it.

His leg gives a little when he puts weight on it. “Fuck you, too,” he mutters to the scar, and does his best to ignore the stab of guilt that follows—the Shiro-saved-your-life guilt, the you’ve-got-it-pretty-okay-considering guilt. The guilt that makes him wonder, sometimes, if he deserves worse than this.

“Ignoring that,” he tells himself aloud, crossing to the task list on the opposite wall. “Yep, that’s right, just think about—work. Or something. That leak in the wastewater treatment division. What’ll be on the food cart tonight. Uh, the threads that keep falling off your dumb crop top. The noise behind you—”

The noise stops.

Matt turns around. There are two masked figures there, closing the door behind them.

“Uh,” Matt blurts, “sorry, talking to myself?”

The taller of the figures, the one with bat-like ears, holds up a finger to their mouth: quiet. Matt copies the gesture automatically, does his best to keep his mouth shut.

Then they approach.

“Uh,” squeaks Matt, trying to stay quiet, “you aren’t Galra.”

The figures look at each other.

“If you tell anyone we’re here,” the shorter figure begins, but Bat-Ears interrupts.

“We need your help,” they say.

“Who are you?” Matt asks. Damn, he’s still squeaking. “How did you get in here?”

The figures look at each other again.

Shorty sighs. “We’re rebels. We’re fighting the Galra. Can you help us?”

And then it explodes. Not literally: there’s no actual explosions, though Matt has to check to make sure of that because the blood roaring in his ears is loud as blast-off, loud as screams at night. But the world explodes, all the same, and Matt stands death-still and open-mouthed and wild.

People fight the Galra?

“Yes,” he says—or at least, he knows his mouth makes the right shape to say it. He can’t hear himself, can’t quite be sure he made an actual decision to speak there.

But that’s nothing new, at least. Matt swallows, blinks, breathes.

“What do you need?” he asks.

“You work in here?” asks Shorty, in reply.

“Yeah,” Matt says. “But I run machinery diagnostics, mostly.”

Bat-Ears’ ears twitch. “Diagnostics. Could you reverse-engineer from that?”

Matt’s heart pounds. “To do what? Break everything?”

“Yes.” Bat-Ears tosses him a data stick. “We’ve got all the passcodes, but we don’t know anything about the factory itself. We need it to shut down, not be fully functional again for at least eight hours.”

Matt, to his own surprise, manages to catch the data stick. Stares at it. “That’s all?”

“Can you do more?” Shorty says.

“If I have time,” Matt says, slowly, “I can corrupt the whole operating system. Lock the records, scramble the delivery orders, hide bugs in the machinery. Unless they pulled in help from off-world, it’d probably take weeks to fix everything.”

“Perfect,” says Shorty. “We got in without tripping any alarms, so there should be enough time. How long before the Galra who work here return?”

Matt shrugs. “Can’t say for sure, but should be at least an hour. They’re at the new year festival.”

Bat-Ears grins. “You’re a lifesaver. Listen, you do this for us and we’ll get you out of here, okay?”

“Okay,” says Matt. His heart pumps wildly but his voice is calm, almost detached. He’s heard people say _too good to be true,_ and he thought he knew what they meant. But oh, he didn’t, not until now. He didn’t know what it meant to be overwhelmed with terror at the possibility of something better.

He twirls on his heel to face the computers and plugs the data stick into place.

Behind him, Shorty and Bat-Ears keep watch, talking in low voices over their comms. Matt hardly hears them. His fingers sprint over the touchscreen, delicate spiders spinning mischief. He almost doesn’t have to think. It all floods back to him, every trick he’s ever known, every tidbit he’s learned about Galra tech, and it works. It all works. He sets it up on a timer so everything will fall apart at once, then starts to cover his tracks in the system.

And so on the day Matt gets rescued, even the pain in his leg turns euphoric. His blood rushes through him and he feels alive, alive in a way he hasn’t in so goddamn long. He’s _happy_. He’s happy and brave and—

And Shorty is grabbing his arm, shaking him. “Someone’s on the way over,” they hiss. “Galra. Just got word. Are you done?”

“Almost,” Matt hisses back. The adrenaline doesn’t fade; he barely processes the fear. “Here, there’s only the one door—you’ll have to hide in here.” He spins away from the console long enough to point. “That closet—you should both fit—go, go, go!”

They go. Matt backtracks desperately out of the folder he’s in, the last of trace of his intrusion into the system, and—no, wait, there’s one more and he taps it and it won’t load and oh fuck, oh God—

The door to the lab slams open.

“Slave!” snarls his boss, and Matt feels everything sucked out of him: the joy, the adrenaline, the rapid pump of his blood. He can’t even get his hands to move. The folder loads painful and slow and he’s frozen, unbreathing.

“Get away from my fucking console,” the Galra yells, and he crosses the room in three long strides and digs his claws into Matt’s shoulder. Matt yelps; his boss shakes him, the claws burrowing deeper in. Twisting. And he keeps yelling, hitting him, and Matt endures. It’s okay, he thinks, with some difficulty. This is better than the Galra actually paying attention to the computer. Getting hit is—it’s okay. It’s okay, it’s normal, it’s not that bad—

And then an elbow rams into his gut and he crumples. His boss, still raging, starts to drag him out of the room by his hair.

Yeah, Matt thinks, as he struggles to get properly to his feet. Yeah, that’s right, you asshole, let the rebels escape, ignore the real problem, that’s right—

Or at least, he tries to think it. He tries to think of everything but freedom: how the possibility opened up before him like wild space on the Kerberos flight, how it glowed and flickered and died.

He can’t get his balance. The Galra’s cruel grip wrenches at his scalp and Matt cries out again, helpless. But the journey to the solitary lockdown block is mercifully short. The Galra tosses him into a cell; Matt lands hard on his bad leg and curls in on himself.

For a minute everything is grayed-out with pain. Helpless, Matt thinks as he whimpers. Always helpless.

And he’s angry at himself. As his boss looms in the doorway, hand on his gun, Matt’s angry. Why was he such a goddamn idiot as to think about fighting back? He _knows better_. He’s known better since the early days, when Shiro was still around to plan desperate escapes, when they all three shared a cell and at least he could come home after long days of torture or work to his dad’s worn smile.

His boss growls at him, yells. Matt doesn’t look up. Just cowers on the floor, covering his head, waiting to find out if today is the day he finally gets killed.

But it isn’t. It’s the day he gets rescued, and when his boss is done beating him, when the door is slammed and locked, then—

Then it explodes.

Matt startles. Coughs. Half-rises.

And then, through the smoke, he sees them. The masked figures. The rebels, coming back for him. Too much is inexplicable, these days, and escape—

_Too good to be true,_ Matt thinks, but he struggles up on his bad leg anyway.

“Hurry!” hisses Bat-Ears. Shorty grabs Matt by the wrist and they run, feet pounding out hope on the tile.

In the hangar, a ship is waiting.

They tumble in. And yeah, the getaway’s rough; Bat-Ears dives across the ship to man the guns as the pilot gets the shields up and there’s shouting, so much shouting. Matt’s ears are ringing. He can’t make out the words—for a moment, he wonders if it’s a language he doesn’t know, wonders if there’s no translation tech now that they’re outside the camp. And then he just wonders because he’s wondering again, because he cares about knowing something.

Because, for a flash of a moment, he feels like himself.

The ship swerves wildly. “Look out!” Shorty yells.

Matt tries to grab for a support. Misses. Everything’s gray, he realizes, and a little fuzzy. When his bad leg gives and he feels himself fall, it’s like slow motion. Suddenly he’s just sprawled on the tilting floor of the ship, blinking as he stares upwards.

Shorty, above him, casts an indignant glance at the pilot. “Careful there!”

“Sorry,” she yells back, “but we’re about to breach atmo, so buckle up!”

Shorty sticks a hand out for Matt to pull himself up. They fumble a lot and trip each other and somehow finally wind up in the seats along the side, where they strap themselves in.

“You okay?” Shorty calls to Matt over the noise: the engines, the blasters, the yelling.

Dazed, Matt nods. He’d better not have a concussion, he thinks, or work is going to be so much worse tomorrow. He’ll have to fix everything he scrambled and he won’t be able to do it fast enough and then he’ll get hit again and—

“You sure?” Shorty asks. They clear atmo; everything goes quiet. Not like an explosion, but like the still slowness when you know one’s coming. When you know everything’s about to change.

“You came back for me,” Matt says. Or at least, he feels his mouth say it. Hears the words fall out into the silence around.

Shorty shrugs a bit. “We promised, didn’t we?”

“You came back,” Matt repeats, a little stupidly. Then he frowns. “I have a concussion.”

“Hang on.” Shorty frowns, too, and unclips their seatbelt. “I’ll get the medkit and look you over.”

They rummage around the ship, calling questions to their crewmates. Matt, still buckled in, picks at a thread that dangles from his shirt and worries someone will notice he’s not cuffed. But around him, the crew bickers pleasantly, and the ship continues its calm hurtle into wild space.

It’s inexplicable. And yet, somehow, it really is the day he gets rescued, so Matt closes his eyes and breathes it in.


End file.
